Imagine The Walking Dead started in 50 years from now. The way things are going now, picture this scenario:
>A survivor is walking down a lonesome road.
>They arive at a small resort and there’s a car covered in dust and dirt in the parking lot.
>They approach the car and check whether it still has some bio fuel left in the tank.
>Still plenty.
>They look around spotting a decayed body close by.
>They search the body and are lucky to find a ‘keyless’ key belonging to the car.
>There are no door handles and the battery inside the key corroded away.
>They break the glass and open the door from the inside.
>Finally inside, there’s still no way to start the engine without the key.
>They have an idea.
>The digital wrist watch on the body should have the same battery as the key.
>After a bit of tinkering with some tools they get the key working again.
>They press the ignition button.
>The displays light up but the engine remains quiet.
>The displays show error messages:
ERROR CODE: ND47089
Tire pressure sensor subscription expired
Please schuedule service or enter payment information
Engine start failed
>MFW
I think modern apocalypse movies should show someone grabbing solar panels off apartment balconies to recharge an abandoned electric car.
Not even close to enough energy to be practical in the real world, but close enough for movie logic.
Kinda wrong.
You can’t get enough solar energy to directly drive a car any practical distance, but you aren’t actually driving your car most of the time. When you look at weekly energy requirements, most drivers would be able to accumulate enough energy for all of their driving with just a few decent panels. You would need a battery to take advantage of this, or only drive at night.
Also, check out the solar cannonball run. A guy made a mobile rig of like 40 flexible panels and drove a Model three across the US using only solar charging.
Just gonna leave this here:
https://aptera.us/
Oh boy.
Alrighty not even gonna click that link, here is why…
Aptera claims to get about 40 miles of range per day with their full solar package and ideal conditions. Which is fantastic! But, it’s not the solar technology that makes that car viable, its the high efficiency of their vehicle. If we assume 40 miles per day, 12 hours of sun, you could hypothetically directly drive the Aptera with solar at a blistering …3.3mph. To put it simply, unless solar panels get an order of magnitude more efficient, we are not going to get a direct solar driven vehicle. It will always be solar plus a big ass battery.
I’ve been watching Aptera closely since 2015, and I already have a reservation for one. That’s the other reason I don’t have to click that link. I get updates straight into my feed and I’ve gone over their documents multiple times forward and back.
Correct - not direct drive, but seems like that’s not really a necessary goal for most of us. If you really need to be able to just drive non stop all day while the sun is out, I don’t think that’s been solved yet (would still have to stop for gas even).
Hence why I said “Kinda Wrong” .
Practically any solar panel can fully recharge an EV, it’s just a matter of how long it’s going to take. Sure there are some battery losses, yada yada, but a single 100W panel would charge up an EV in a few months.
If the car is tied to a location that is already safe and secure in a post apocalyptic setting, then sure. But a post apocalyptic car is really only needed to haul stuff around or as protection against things outside the vehicle, and depending on the apocalypse you likely need to stay mobile, reinforce a secure location, or relocate to somewhere remote away from urban areas. Transporting the panels to a remote location will take time and effort, and if you need to be mobile you won’t have time to charge.
Now if you had a rural home with solar panels on the roof and the location was secure an electric car would serve you well until something mechanical or the batteries failed and if you didn’t need to travel far you could use it regularly too.
How about pulling the batteries from a remote control and using them to start an electric car? After all, it’s electricity and we all know batteries don’t go bad after sitting idle for 10 years, right? Movie logic. It just works.
Electric vehicles can charge from a standard outlet. I would imagine if you gather enough of those panels that actually plug into a standard outlet, you could charge a car (though slowly). Your average EV can put on about 10 miles to its “tank” every hour of charging at 120 volts. I don’t know what the amps of those panels are though.
The alternative would be if the protagonist found a home with solar panels and backup batteries. These exist today, and are becoming more common. I don’t know if sodium ion backup batteries have a longer life than LFP or lithium ion.
It would be easy to find enough solar panels to charge an electric vehicle in most sunny areas, though it would probably be easier to just look for a large enough existing install and skip all the DIY. (Just look for the shiniest roof.)
But I think the real problem is in the EV itself. Batteries self-discharge and chemically degrade over time, so unless the apocalypse was recent, a lot of EVs you find might have damaged batteries, especially if fully discharged to begin with.
You could cannibalize one or more EVs to cobble together enough good cells to get past the safety cutoffs, but it would take a while and you would need to be careful since internal voltage in EVs tends to be high (like 400-800 volts).
TLDR: if this is a movie depiction, definitely use a montage.
In a real apocalypse scenario, those BEVs would get scavenged to create electric
bikesgenerators, grain mills, and water pumps. The original cars are not useful in a world without deliberately car-dependent economic systems, and it’s just not a proper apocalypse if you’ve still got an automotive lobby.Edit: BEV motors 2 big 4 bike
Mad Max
Say what you will about the bloodstained vision of senseless carnage and hopeless grief portrayed therein, but at least most wastelanders worked near home.
You would need a lot of panels and days of time to charge to any significant amount of distance. If you set up a solar farm in one location you could use the car for short, regular trips.
You wouldn’t be able to take the panels with you on trips without stopping for several days at a time before traveling another dozen miles or so. Electric vehicles really do pull a massive amount of energy compared to solar cells that the vehicle could haul around.
I think you overestimate the necessity to move long distances in an apocalyptic setting once things have settled. 10miles is actually quite a long distance to move yourself and all your stuff in a day. And since you aren’t expected in the office at 9am, it does not really matter if it takes you 1 hour or 10 days to move somewhere.
10 miles is about 1 hour’s bike ride or 2-3 hours of walking. There’s a reason rural America has a town every 20 miles or so, that’s about half a day’s travel by foot, or one can feasibly go to the next town, do something that takes a while and return back by horse or bike within a day
Once you settle down it isn’t important, but unless you happen to be lucky enough that an urban setting is a good location for a post apocalyptic residence then moving a sizeable distance is a likely need. Any rural area will require moving a few hundred miles at least, and if you can’t take the vehicle with you then it doesn’t serve much of a purpose.
Depends on why things are post apocalyptic of course.
200 watt/panel. 10 panels. 10 hours of charging. 0.2 kW x 10 x 10h = 20 kWh.
Bad mileage because of conductions, so 20 kWh / 100 km.
That means every 10 panels gets you about 100 km / 60 miles per day.
That’s just very rough based on a lot of debatable assumptions of course.